In a Safer Age, U.S. Rethinks Its ‘Tough on Crime’ System

A man in a T-shirt selling drugs in New York in 1989. Closing open-air drug markets drove down shootings in many urban areas.Credit
Ángel Franco/The New York Times

Bullets were flying in the cities. Crack wars trapped people in their homes. The year was 1994, and President Bill Clinton captured the grim national mood, declaring “gangs and drugs have taken over our streets” as he signed the most far-reaching crime bill in history.

The new law expanded the death penalty, and offered the states billions of dollars to hire more police officers and to build more prisons. But what was not clear at the time was that violent crime had already peaked in the early ’90s, starting a decline that has cut the nation’s rates of murder, robbery and assault by half.

Perhaps nowhere has the drop been more stunning than in New York City, which reported only 328 homicides for 2014, compared with 2,245 in 1990. The homicide rate in some cities has fluctuated more — Washington ticked up to 104 in 2014, after a modern low of 88 in 2012. But that still is a drastic fall from a peak of 474 in 1990.

Now, Democrats and Republicans alike are rethinking the vast, costly infrastructure of crime control and incarceration that was born of the earlier crime wave.

“The judicial system has been a critical element in keeping violent criminals off the street,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who is co-sponsor of a bill to reduce some federal drug sentences. “But now we’re stepping back, and I think it’s about time, to ask whether the dramatic increase in incarceration was warranted.”

Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa and the new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has opposed broad reductions in sentences. But he still agreed, in an interview, that “there are a lot of ideas — prison reform, policing, sentencing — being discussed now that wouldn’t be if we hadn’t had this drop in the crime statistics.”

Yet even as law enforcement and the political establishment look toward a new era, the reasons for the broad drop in crime remain elusive. It has confounded both those from the right who had predicted that waves of young predators would terrorize communities and those on the left who watched crime fall even through ups and downs in poverty and unemployment.

There are some areas of consensus. The closing of open-air drug markets drove down shootings in many urban areas. Credit is also given to a revolution in urban policing, in which officers concentrate on crime “hot spots,” as small as a block or a bar, that are responsible for outsize mayhem.

The major increases in drug and gun sentences in the 1980s and ’90s played some role but only a modest one, most experts say, with soaring incarceration rates bringing diminishing returns while disproportionately hitting minorities.

Various experts have also linked the fall in violence to the aging of the population, low inflation rates and even the decline in early-childhood lead exposure.

But in the end, none of these factors fully explain a drop that occurred, in tandem, in much of the world.

“Canada, with practically none of the policy changes we point to here, had a comparable decline in crime over the same period,” said Franklin E. Zimring, a law professor and an expert in criminal justice at the University of California, Berkeley. He described the quest for an explanation as “criminological astrology.”

The fall in serious crime was accompanied by declines in other social ills such as teenage pregnancy, child abuse and juvenile delinquency, emphasizing the role of cultural shifts beyond the ken of the justice system.

“Young people are growing up in a safer environment and behaving more responsibly,” said Jeremy Travis, president of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York and co-editor of a 2014 report by the National Academy of Sciences on the consequences of mass incarceration.

Along with uncertainty about the sources of lower crime are contentious debates about what should come next. How far can incarceration be reduced without endangering safety? Where is the proper line between aggressive, preventive policing and intrusive measures that alienate the law-abiding?

A Safer Country

Annual rate of violent crimes per 100,000 people, 1975–2013.

1991

PEAK:

ALL

VIOLENT

CRIME

Change in

rates since:

1992

POST-

1975

PEAK

1975

–25%

–51%

AGGRAVATED

ASSAULT

1991

–1%

–48%

ROBBERY

–51%

–60%

1992

RAPE

–4%

–41%

1980

MURDER

–53%

–56%

1970s

1980s

1990s

2000s

2010s

THE MURDER RATE*, MAGNIFIED

10

At right, a detail of the murder trend since 1975. The rate plunged from a peak of 10.2 homicides per 100,000 people in 1980

to 4.5 in 2013.

8

6

4

2

’70s

’80s

’90s

’00s

’10s

*Includes non-negligent manslaughter.

Source: Department of Justice

The rise in incarceration has been even more striking than the decline in crime, leading to growing agreement on both the right and the left that it has gone too far. From the early 1970s to 2009, mainly because of changes in sentencing, the share of American residents in state or federal prison multiplied fourfold, reaching 1.5 million on any given day, with hundreds of thousands more held in local jails, although the rate has tapered off somewhat since 2009.

The social and economic costs are now the subject of intense study. Some conservatives such as William G. Otis, a former federal prosecutor and adjunct professor of law at Georgetown University, argue that while many factors account for falling crime, harsher justice surely played a significant role.

“When people are incarcerated they are not out on the street to ransack your home or sell drugs to your high school kid,” he said.

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“The policy decisions to make long sentences longer and to impose mandatory minimums have had minimal effect on crime,” said Mr. Travis, of John Jay College. “The research on this is quite clear.”

Higher imprisonment might explain from 10 percent to, at most, 25 percent of the crime drop since the early 1990s, said Richard Rosenfeld, a criminologist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. But it brought diminishing returns, he said, as those committing less severe crimes also received lengthy sentences.

Many states, led by Republicans as well as by Democrats, have acted to reduce sentences for low-level and nonviolent crimes and to improve drug and other treatment services, while still bringing down crime rates.

In the Congress, figures as varied as Senator Durbin and Republican senators including Mike Lee of Utah and Rand Paul of Kentucky have supported cuts in federal sentencing.

Police methods entered the spotlight after the deaths of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., and Eric Garner in New York led to mass protests, followed by the murderous targeting of two officers in New York.

Combined at its best with close public cooperation, the concentration of police resources on crime hot spots has been shown, in several studies, to reduce crime without simply pushing it elsewhere, said Daniel S. Nagin, a criminologist at Carnegie Mellon University.

Methods used with success in New York City in the mid-1990s under Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and his police commissioner William J. Bratton have been widely imitated, including the mapping of crime and concentration of forces in trouble spots and use of “CompStat” data and meetings to hold local commanders accountable for crime in their precincts.

John F. Timoney, who was No. 2 in the New York Police Department at the time and later headed police departments in Philadelphia and Miami, said new attention to seemingly minor crimes like public drunkenness and vandalism is also vital.

“It’s the quality-of-life issues that dominate community meetings,” he said. Pushing street officers to respond, under the so-called broken windows theory, won public support and sometimes headed off more serious criminal behavior, he said.

But some say the tactics too often devolved into overly aggressive policing and the “stop and frisk” policy at the center of controversy in New York, in which officers search young men, mainly black and Hispanic, on little pretext.

In the wake of the police killings of unarmed black men in Missouri and New York, President Obama established a task force of police officials and experts that is expected to recommend increases in community policing, which has declined since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and other changes intended to repair the gulf between law enforcers and minorities as well as improve crime prevention.

Given how poorly trends in crime were foreseen in the past, and the role of deeper social forces, there is no guarantee that crime rates will not rise again.

But there is wide agreement on measures outside the scope of the criminal justice system that could foster further declines or blunt any rise, Dr. Nagin said. Enriching the early childhoods of high-risk children, expanding drug treatment programs and offering more mental health services are prime examples.

A news analysis article on Wednesday about American officials’ rethinking crime control and incarceration in light of a declining crime rate misidentified, in some editions, the university where Daniel S. Nagin, who discussed law enforcement issues, is a criminologist. It is Carnegie Mellon University, not Case Western Reserve University.

A version of this news analysis appears in print on January 14, 2015, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: In a Safer Age, U.S. Rethinks Its ‘Tough on Crime’ System. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe